


The Ground's a Long Way Down (But I Need More)

by theoldgods



Category: Rocketman (2019)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Airplane Sex, Drug Use, Drunkenness, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Open Relationship, Intoxicated Sex, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 08:23:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20485820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: On the private plane back to London after another US tour, an extremely drunk Bernie finds himself awkwardly, accidentally party to his extremely drunk friend's sexual escapades.





	The Ground's a Long Way Down (But I Need More)

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place at some point in the general height of fame mess post-"Honky Cat" but obviously before Elton and Reid break up, with Elton still enamored with Reid but with Reid's controlling side pretty evident, even if a wasted Bernie doesn't really comprehend it. (The film timeline is vague and so is this fic's!) Usual general warning for alcohol, drugs, sex, and the mixture thereof.
> 
> This is based on movie depictions only and should not be read as any sort of comment on the real life people involved, the real life Elton/Reid relationship, etc. Please see the endnotes for more specific/spoiler-y content notes, if needed.
> 
> Title from ["Madman Across the Water."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWrzhWnzhAs)

Bernie is properly drunk before they even board the plane back to London, thanks to an impromptu celebratory bar crawl across lower Manhattan; the brandy a similarly blitzed Elton passes to him before they strap themselves in for takeoff sits hot in his lap. He takes a swig straight from the bottle as they speed down the runway, and Elton, in the seat next to him, watches and laughs, the sound echoing warmly in Bernie’s ears. By the end of the tour Bernie had felt simultaneously exhausted and wide-eyed with wonder, pulled between the highs of their never-ending stash of cocaine and the maudlin emotions of the beer he drinks continually backstage, but now that it’s over he could almost miss every sleepless night, every beautiful woman flinging herself at the Elton John hangers-on.

It’s a long red-eye back across the Atlantic, of course, and Bernie knows they should all sleep to make the jetlag bearable upon their morning London time landing, but the brandy is just as hot in his stomach and the white pile on the upright piano does not seem to get any smaller, no matter how many times people return to it. Trapped high above the earth, nowhere and everywhere all at once, time passes in blurry moments: Elton, bashing out “Crocodile Rock” into the piano while the band jeers; one of the blondes somehow on the plane, her mouth on Bernie’s while a passing Reid, drinking from a bottle of whiskey while his other arm curls around some not-Elton stranger, murmurs “you’re welcome” into Bernie’s ear; another woman—Bernie assumes it’s a different one; her hair is darker—backing him against the plane’s fur-covered bed, fingernails blazingly red against his stomach as she lifts his shirt clear of his trousers.

If she does more than that, Bernie doesn’t quite remember; the next thing he’s aware of is stumbling to his feet to try to open the bedroom door. It shouldn’t be complicated—it’s just a door, and, as he well knows from previous flights, it doesn’t even lock—and yet the sliding handle is beyond his soaked brain and trembling hands, which refuse to grip properly.

From somewhere in the plane he can hear Elton, in full camp splendor, screeching, “Come now, ladies, plenty of powder for everyone!” followed by distinctly masculine laughter. 

“Elton!” He presses his forehead against the door, bangs it with a shaking fist. “Open the door!”

His voice won’t go above a stage whisper, but really, it should be enough—Elton has an uncanny ability to appear at exactly the right or exactly the wrong time, never anywhere in between, and this is absolutely the best/worst moment of Bernie’s evening thus far.

“You won’t get any more from _ me _ tonight, madam! _ Ooh, _ I say—”

Bernie rolls his eyes and turns away from the door. His brandy bottle lies on its side at the foot of the bed, contents pooling into the deep purple carpet, and he leans down to pick it up.

The world turns on its axis as he bends and keeps bending, ending curled against the wall, licking the last remaining drops from the bottle as his ears roar.

When Bernie next comes to, it’s because something has slammed, jostling his feet. His cheek is digging into none-too-soft fiber and his eyes won’t open, but somewhere above him are loud, wet sounds, interspersed with hazy male voices.

“I want—”

“The whole world, I know.”

Scottish, and familiar, followed by a giggle that reminds Bernie of some cafe, somewhere, years ago now.

“_You_, silly git.”

Warm, if sozzled, and Bernie smiles into the carpet because, _ finally_, Elton’s come to unlock that damned door. He struggles to lift his head.

“Well, I’d fucking hope so.”

Bernie freezes, because he knows—remembers—now that that’s Reid, and it’s Reid’s most predatory voice and oh, Christ.

He shouldn’t. He should just go back into the darkness, but he’s also surprisingly awake, as he hasn’t been in hours. He slowly looks up, at the bed, where Elton is sprawled across the striped black and white fur, his hands cupping Reid’s arse as Reid looms over him, both of them loose-limbed and grinning.

A dull pain begins behind Bernie’s right eye.

For a long minute there’s just grabbing, kissing, Elton’s tour-roughened fingers kneading into Reid’s arse, Reid mouthing at Elton’s neck, periodically granting a mouth-on-mouth kiss that makes Elton groan ever more loudly each time. Bernie has seen them at this before, trashed nights at Elton’s house when everyone except Bernie had cleared out from or passed out at the party, though he’s so used to the weirdly sexless facade Elton presents to the wider world that the sight of Elton delirious with lust makes him shiver. Usually it’s just open-mouthed kisses, coming back to themselves in time to retreat somewhere truly private for whatever the hell they get up to next.

Bernie, wasted on the ground in a private jet, speeding miles in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, remembers that they are about as private as one can get in this tin can and that they almost certainly don’t know he’s conscious. They might not even know he’s there at all.

Elton’s hand slides down the front of Reid’s trousers, pulling his shirttails free just as some woman had done to Bernie at some point earlier on this mess of an airplane, and as Reid bites at Elton’s ear, Bernie tells himself to move.

His body does not respond. Regardless of where his head is at—and Bernie genuinely doesn’t know the answer, has a few moments of wondering if this is his own private hallucination, though why he would imagine Elton, imagine _ Reid_, having sex he doesn’t know—his body is drunk and content on the floor. And if he does move, he realizes with dread, he almost certainly can’t get out of that stupid fucking door without raising a racket loud enough to distract anyone, even a pair of drunks trying to get off with one another.

The obvious next move is to close his eyes again. The booze is there, curled in his veins, waiting to reclaim him, and whatever coke he used was long enough ago that it’s probably happy to submit to the pull of alcohol. Bernie will close his eyes, and he will pass out again, and this will turn into an insane fever dream he might be able to laugh about in future, if he even remembers it.

Instead he watches, pulled into fascination against his own better instincts (maybe the cocaine is stronger than he knew), as Elton slides his tongue into Reid’s mouth, hard and awkwardly, like a teenager behind a garden shed instead of one of America’s favorite pop stars. (Bernie’s mind skitters away from considering how it is that he’s yoked to a pop star, a genuine fucking pop star, because it’s all entirely too much and if they stop to think about what they’re doing here, month after month, he’s sure it will fall to pieces.) A part of Bernie wonders if he’d be so transfixed if this were just another bloke pulling just another girl, instead of his best friend with his own live-in boyfriend; he’s seen bits of probably hundreds of stupid drunken trysts on this tour alone, but even within Elton’s decidedly queerer than average entourage, none have involved two men. (A few have involved two drunk women, but Bernie, who was enraptured by that in a wholly different way, only belatedly puts that in the same _ queer _ category as whatever this is.)

Reid’s hands slow, becoming something close to gentle, as he reaches down to thumb at Elton’s zip, and Elton’s groan is soft and echoing in Bernie’s aching brain. This suspended moment lasts only a second before Elton bucks his hips in response to Reid’s hands shoving down his trousers and pants, but it leaves some quiet breath in its wake, settling like a not-unhappy haze around Bernie.

He can’t actually see Elton’s—Elton’s _ cock_—from his position on the floor, but he can see the pleasure that settles across Elton’s face as Reid presumably takes him in his mouth. Elton’s spangled vest has been tossed onto the pillow behind him, and his shirt is unbuttoned, hanging half off his shoulders, while his thinning hair stands on end; Reid is still almost fully clothed, black dress shirt and white trousers, white and gold braces dangling crazily below his waist. Elton looks at peace, in a way he so rarely does in any of their waking moments nowadays, and Bernie feels something in him soften. 

He watches what he can see of Elton’s face, because the alternative is apparently watching Reid’s dark bowed head and in any case Bernie still doesn’t know how _ not _ to watch Elton, drawn like every other person he knows to that chaotic teddy-bear charisma. Bernie’s heart tightens in tandem with Elton’s mouth, beating in some sort of strange drunken synchronization with Elton’s contorting face and occasional moans, and if his body starts to respond, well, a moan is a moan, and Bernie can absolutely put himself almost directly in Elton’s shoes, with any number of women. (If the room were dark enough—if Reid hadn’t cut the longer Californian curls he had when Bernie first met him—)

Reid pulls off with a wet pop, and Elton’s cry of dismay turns into a pleased yelp as Reid flips them both, landing on the bed and immediately unbuttoning his trousers. Elton, naked from the waist down, is a pale blot across Bernie’s half-closed eyes as he straddles Reid.

“What d’you—”

Elton is stuttering, his voice wrecked from booze and coke, and Reid’s reply is hardly any clearer.

“Take me.”

Elton responds at once, his hands tugging at Reid’s trousers, and Bernie absolutely cannot look away—almost doesn’t even _ want _ to—as Elton looks down.

A part of Bernie assumes, inasmuch as he assumes anything about his life at this moment, that it’s going to be another messy drunken blow job. Elton’s next, awed words thus confuse him more than anything else.

“You’re already—who? How?”

Reid laughs, half a bark. “You _ said _ I could—”

“If you _ tell me_.”

Desperate, and lust-filled, with a sharp edge that’s both sultry and challenging, and Bernie’s mind has gone utterly blank attempting to process any of the words he’s hearing. (Even if he were sober, he dimly realizes, none of this would make sense; he’s learned more about _ the scene _ than most not-queer men he knows, but some things are far beyond his comprehension.) 

“There _ is _ a loo on this plane.”

Elton leans forward, his hand working at something, and the sliver of Reid’s face that Bernie can see reminds him of nothing so much as a lion, smug and only growing smugger as Reid moans.

“_Who_,” Elton says—a command, not even a question, his hand moving all the while, and Reid’s answer is crystal clear even around his groan.

“Asked for fingers and not his _ name_, darling.”

Elton’s hips thrust, and Bernie, from his awkward positioning on the floor, takes several seconds to realize he is in fact watching Elton, face to face with his lover, seat himself in Reid’s arse.

Bernie’s eyes drift closed, out of shame or confusion or some sense of belated respect he doesn’t know, but he’s still well attuned to the sounds of skin on skin, breathy wordless utterances, and a slowly building, almost taunting keen.

“You were—so good—”

Scottish, barely audible over the keen, which means it must be _ Elton _ making that unholy noise as he drives himself into Reid, and Bernie’s mind spirals. He focuses only on the sound of his own blood pounding through his ears, hot and close to his hopelessly scrambled brain, and when he next tunes into the outside world, it’s to quiet breathless laughter from above and Reid’s soft rumbling burr.

“See what you get when you behave yourself?”

“A desperate little slut?”

Elton’s voice is dry yet fond, and Bernie cracks open an eye in time to see Elton, collapsed on top of Reid’s thickly furred chest, trail beringed fingers down Reid’s side. One of Reid’s hands appears out of nowhere to snatch Elton’s wrist, forcing him to stop. The silence that follows strikes Bernie as awkward, the jest hanging heavy in the air until Elton speaks again, his surprisingly hesitant words buried into Reid’s shoulder.

“It was a good tour, John.”

“And the next will be even better.”

Reid’s voice is firm, his hands digging into Elton’s arse, and Elton sighs, relaxing further into Reid. Bernie’s eyelids close once more.

The next thing Bernie’s aware of is his head lifting from the carpet. Bernie attempts to swallow around the dryness in his mouth as Reid’s face—the blue of his eyes ringed with spidery, hungover red—comes into focus.

“Are you always such a sneaky little shite?”

It takes several seconds for Reid’s whispered words to register. Bernie stares, slack-mouthed, possibly drooling slightly, in the meanwhile, and by the time he’s processed the question, Reid, fully dressed, is already heading for the bedroom door.

“We’re landing in an hour, and you look worse than I feel, so I’d start to clean yourself up if I were you.” His fingers tighten on the doorframe. “Wake Elton before absolutely necessary and I’ll kill you.”

A joke, surely, though it lands about as well as a half-remembered whatever someone—Elton?—had said earlier and oh, God, Bernie groans as earlier bits and pieces come flooding back. Outside the plane is blinding light—sunlight, streaming in through an unshuttered window, because somehow it’s now past dawn wherever the hell they are. Bernie sits up gingerly, kicking his long-emptied brandy bottle out of the way, and looks at the bed, where Elton is sprawled fast asleep under the fur throw, frowning into his pillow, one arm hanging off the side. His clothes are piled neatly by his head.

Bernie massages his temples and glances at the empty, open doorway. The plane is eerily quiet after the earlier racket, the only sound the whine of the engines, not quite covering the half-snore Elton emits as he shifts position. Bernie, numb and wincing against the light and his own memories, watches him sleep for several minutes before stumbling to his feet to obey Reid.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains characters wasted out of their minds, Bernie possibly having sex that he doesn't remember, Elton/Reid intoxicated sex while Bernie (unknown to them) accidentally watches, Reid mentioning having been with another man (with Elton's possessiveness but also implied approval), Reid being low-key controlling and physically possessive, and Bernie having some period-typical casually homophobic thought processes going on. And as there are groupies making cameo appearances, there's probably also some period-typical casual misogyny going on in the background too.
> 
> I tried to based the plane's appearance on what we see in the brief scene set there before Bernie peaces out, but if you're curious about the actual plane the real life Elton John entourage (and other rock groups) used in the mid-70s, the official Elton website has [an article up](https://www.eltonjohn.com/stories/starship-one-four-years-of-flying-fun) about it.
> 
> Comments and kudos and all the rest very welcome if you're so moved, and if you want Rocketman and/or Elton and the occasional 70s rock reblog mixed among your feed, I'm also on [tumblr.](http://theoldgods.tumblr.com)


End file.
